Fireforge Foot Sergeants

[janner]

I think the infantry are their best work - fair less 'fantasy' in style and stuff I will consider using.

All dependent on cost of course. I am happy to pay for top quality, but at the moment these seem overpriced.

[Mick_in_Switzerland]

Has anybody seen these yet?

[Captain Blood]

Nope. I'm waiting for the foot knights 

[Mick_in_Switzerland]

My box of Foot Sergeants arrived this morning.  Here is a quick “unboxing” report.

The figures look nicely sculpted as expected from the pictures on Facebook.
All the plastic parts are grey and look like Renedra produced items (Perry, Gripping Beast etc.).  
Moulding quality is excellent.

You get six identical sprues, each with eight bodies, giving 48 figures.  
From the box set, you can make maximum 24 crossbowmen, or maximum 36 spearmen (corrected) or maximum 36 with hand weapons.

There are no command options (i.e. banners, drums or horns) in this set.  
I understand that foot command will be in the foot knights sets, that are due later.

There are also bases for the Deus Vult game.  
These are 12 bases for singles @ 20mm x 20mm and 8 bases designed for six men at 60mm x 40mm.  
I am not sure whether gamers using other rules will want so many bases of six men.  

There is a leaflet for Deus Vult.  
There are no other extras to delight you (i.e. no history notes, no transfers, no casualties, nor paper flags).

It is a good "unit builder set" for somebody making a large army.  
For somebody making a skirmish force, the lack of command is an annoyance.

Compared to the Perry WOTR sets, these work out more expensive (Fireforge 58p, Perry 45p) and the box lacks some extra delight features.  
Compared to GW Bretonians, or any metals, they are excellent value for money.

I have not decided what to do with them yet.  
A few will become dungeon explorer henchmen.  
The rest will be built as medieval infantry to serve as Crusaders or possibly Hussites.  

Some of the crossbows and hand weapons will be used to give my Swiss and Burgundian infantry (i.e. Perry European Armies) even more variety.  

Mick

[Sangennaru]

Thanks for the report, Mick. Now photos! even fast ones! ^^

[Engel]

Ohh nice.

[Captain Blood]

Thanks for the early report, Mick. Would you say the hand weapons and spears are in scale generally?
My criticism (well one of a couple ) of the Fireforge mounted sets, was the stupidly outsize 'fantasy-scale' axes, morning stars, etc...
Have they toned it down with the foot set, so the weapons look more proportionate and less GW-silly?

Agree it's irritating they haven't included command figures or any extras (flags etc) - especially when you consider these are 30% per figure more expensive than the Perry Medievals and (if the cavalry are anything to go by), certainly aren't a patch on the Perrys in terms of fineness of detail and quality of animation.

But I shall wait for the foot knights and see...

[killshot]

That stinks about the lack of the command  , but I'm still going to get a box of them.  I'm working on the mounted sergeants and I'm enjoying them.  I haven't worked with plastic in a long time. 

[Mick_in_Switzerland]

I have got home from work and cut the parts off one sprue.  

There is some very good news for Captain Blood and others

There are 8 bodies but six unique poses.
There are 6 spear hands (not 8 as I reported earlier).  They are all different
There are 4 sets of crossbow arms - again all different
There are 6 hand weapon arms - two swords, two maces or spiked clubs, two axes - again all different
There are 10 different heads
There are 4 different sets of shields and arms (two of each = 8 total)

The weapons and hands are similar in size and style to the Perry WOTR figures.  
They are similar enough that you could use the forearms and weapons to customise the Perry figures and vice versa  
(I think I will have some Burgundian artillerymen and archers armed with hand weapons very soon.)

They have the same neck on body system as Gripping Beast so you would need to add a neck a Perry figure if you wanted to fit a Fireforge head.

Fireforge album on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.481357498550246.114214.271339052885426&type=3

Mick

[Captain Blood]

Hmm. Thanks. That sounds quite encouraging 

[Lord Ekard]

i'm building my crusader archers with perry mercenaries hands with bow and the rest from our foot sergeants

i will show something when i will have some time to paint them

[Verderer]

Ok, so the mounted and foot sergeants are out, right? Sorry, havent' been paying attention lately? How soon will the foot knights be released? I might just order some Sergeants and Templars to support this endeavour, I guess it must be expensive to raise a whole product range in plastic. So hopefully people won't just wait until it's complete, cause in the worst case scenario it won't happen because enough people didn't buy the existing product?

[Verderer]

A bit of threadomancy here, but I am thinking of painting my FF sargeants, and was wondering about the colours: would it make more sense to paint whole groups wearing the same livery, or paint really mixed liveries like in the FF sample pics? How did they form historically etc? Painting Templar sargeants is dead easy cause they all wore the same livery (plus i got the transfer sets), but what about your secular men at arms? Knights would have individual coats of arms, but even if the sargeants were gathered from personal retinues of various knights, would they have been given some idenfying kit, like similar shields or something? Of their unit commander maybe? I kinda hate the idea of painting multiple liveries for the sargeants as well. Call me lazy.